I’ve eaten 10 creme eggs in 6 days1 and my stomach might never forgive me. You know the saying, “this is why we can’t have nice things”? That’s me, but with creme eggs. And Lotus Biscoff.
Above the paywall today: London trivia, Black Mirror, K-face and an excellent interview with author Claire Keegan
Below the paywall today: podcast recs, deleted scenes, notes on memoir, and more great interviews/ journalism
A quick events update:
On 25th May, I’ll be in conversation with David Szalay and Natasha Brown for Charleston Literary Festival
On 8th June, I’m interviewing Ita O’Brien—intimacy coordinator for Normal People, Sex Education and I May Destroy You—at Southbank
On 14th June, I’m interviewing Jacinda Arden for How To Academy at Central Hall Westminster (a real pinch me moment!)
Some solid gold pop trivia from Geri Halliwell last week, who told Scott Mills (Radio 2) that her Union Jack dress was a black mini dress with a tea towel sewn on top. A dress that you can dry the dishes on? Tradwife goals! No wonder it sold at auction for £41,320
Speaking of, whoever came up with this deserves a prize:
And another visual lol from the week: a book clear-out on my road, with a near perfect emotional arc:
And because this newsletter is nothing without a rando animal fact: last week I learned that a group of jellyfish is called a smack. I adore aquariums—my favourite place in the world is the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The London Aquarium is not as spectacular, but we did get to see a real life Jonty Gentoo2.
I loved London’s Centric’s3 deep-dive into the city’s newly re-named overground lines. Those rejected in favour of Liberty, Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver and Windrush include: Malin (after the first fish and chip shop in the UK), Huggett (after the longest-surviving suffragist Annie Huggett) and Polari—“a form of language which originated in the London's fish markets, theatres, fairgrounds and circuses [ then] adopted by the gay subculture at a time when being homosexual was illegal”
Instagram face is out; it’s all about K-Face. (Does Jesus even weep anymore?) Writes Jane Chung, a Korean American writer whose family offered her double eyelid surgery when she was 14, for Business Insider:
“While the catlike face is having a moment…other popular archetypes are vying for supremacy in Korea (and increasingly, China and Japan), including gang-a-ji-sang (doglike face), bem-sang (snake-like face), or even gong-ryong-sang (dinosaur-like face). Keeping up with the Koreans is exhausting.”
According to Gen Z, millennial officewear that they (Gen Z) would not be caught dead in includes floral blouses, loud prints, loose dresses and pencil skirts. Pencil skirts??? Am I Joan Harris?
There’s a brilliant interview with Claire Keegan by Seb Emina in the current issue of The Gentlewoman (print only). Keegan is the master of economic storytelling, with her simple, potent novellas and quiet, steadfast characters. “You know how there’s somebody at a wedding and they want the microphone because they want to go on and on? The kind of stories I am interested in, they don’t want the microphone.” I’ve actually only read Small Things Like These (tender, devastating) about the Magdalene Laundries; I plan to read Foster next
I read somewhere that Black Mirror has a series hit rate of two excellent, two meandering and two misfires. I’ve still got two to go of series 7, but it’s true that the first two were so thrilling I held my hand over my mouth—emitting muffled omigods every few minutes—and the next two I DNF.
In Common People, a grieving labourer named Mike (Chris O’Dowd) employs the services of a pioneering technology which can restore cognitive function, after a tumour leaves his teacher wife Amanda (Rashida Jones) brain dead. With her new chip, she’s just like old Amanda. But then she starts shutting down the moment they leave the county—forcing the couple to upgrade to a cripplingly expensive package; and then Amanda starts reciting adverts every 5 minutes, to her husband’s horror—necessitating a further upgrade (which Mike funds by filming humiliating videos for fetish websites); and then Amanda needs to sleep for 22 hours a day, because Rivermind are using her brain as an extra server ‘in return’ for keeping her alive. (Tracee Ellis Ross is the episode’s stand-out, as a shudderingly chipper Medtech salesperson.) It is shockingly good, bleak as fuck, and thankfully followed by the audacious and hilarious Bête Noire, which has a laugh-out-loud pay-off. Charlie Brooker recently told the BBC that, “Black Mirror could just run and run”—now he’s cooking on Hollywood budgets, I see no reason why it won’t.